Index Policies for Real-Time Multicast Scheduling for Wireless Broadcast Systems

Abstract—Motivated by the increasing usage of wireless broadcast networks for multicast real-time applications like video, this paper considers a canonical real-time multicast scheduling problem for a wireless broadcast LAN. A wireless access point (AP) has N latency-sensitive flows, each associated with a deadline and a multicast group of receivers that desire to receive all the packets successfully by their corresponding deadlines. We consider periodic and one-shot models of real-time arrivals. The channel from the AP to each receiver is a wireless erasure channel, independent across users and slots. We wish to find a communication strategy that minimizes the total deadlines missed across all receivers, where a receiver counts a miss if it does not receive a packet by its deadline. We cast this problem as a restless bandit in stochastic control. We use Whittle’s relaxation framework for restless bandits to establish Whittle-indexability for multicast realtime scheduling under t...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: INFOCOM
• Authors: Vivek Raghunathan, Vivek S. Borkar, Min Cao, P. R. Kumar
• Keywords: Communications, Erasure Channel, INFOCOM 2008, Multicast, Whittle Index